I was looking along the living room shelves, newly brightened, for some clear short tale for late july, and chose So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which I read up at the pond, between dunking in the dark water and maybe pulling out some water soldiers and bogbean and wondering why on earth, precisely, Florrie Heelan has to move his fields around so often with heavy machinery on quiet days in summer. William Maxwell is farmland/small town America, his Illinois rural and foreboding, accepting and at the same time evading. Acceptance a kind of evasion in its own right.
My copy has pencil marks beside passages I liked the last time or the time before that. I find my former selves, old influences that have permeated, by now, and become part of my fabric. The child who says, So Long, See You Tomorrow, to his friend, is there on my current meadow, along with the lost furniture of his childhood, sofas, mahogany tables, pictures, big square books full of photographs that he knew by heart, that his fingers had absently traced.
If they hadn't disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, so Ortega Y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.
No comments :
Post a Comment